My opinion is mixed. I have a copy but rarely use it directly (I use some of the sounds). The word builder seems to work reasonably well to give you a default placement of vowels and consonants. My biggest complaint is that the choir "Altos" stop at A4, I believe, assuming anything higher is "Soprano". And the bass stops similarly at around A3, so you don't have that dramatic difference in real voices between a high baritone and a tenor. And I think the basic choir sounds are somewhat weaker (reflecting not-so-good singers being recorded) than a much older choral release by same people, "Voices of the Apocalypse". It too has just "men" and "women" not SATB. Symphonic choirs has an extra dynamic level over the earlier release: p mf and f, not just p and f, plus good cross-fading between them.

To get good results with it is possible, but not without a great deal of work to enliven the default sounds and word positioning. In a neighbor thread here ("better midi renditions ..") I gave a link to an Ave Verum Corpus made with the Symph Choir, the Theo Vosse version. English, of course, is much harder than Latin, because of the diphthongs, but I think the word builder makes a stab at English vowels too.

You're welcome, Ray, good luck with it. Both sets, I think, are mainly targeted to film and tv composers, rather than the choral composer. One of these days I hope to introduce an internet version of a 'real choir': live recorded singers contributing tracks to be mixed into a very good, and very real, representation of the composers' writing.

I purchased EW Symphonic Choirs immediately upon hearing about it last year. It is a very cool program indeed. Not too much of a learning curve to get rolling with basic phonetics and midi keyboard integration. The fallback from a choral director's standpoint, is that manipulating diction to achieve a more smooth, legible, legato delivery of text is a grueling process. Everything in it is setup for quick execution of consonants. There are no natural dipthongs installed, so you have to choose two vowels, overlap them, and fade them in and out of one another. Definitely not geared toward a choral director unless you've got a lot of time. I've emailed the owner, Nick Phoenix, with some ideas on how to have a default adjuster for say... all voice-contuant consonants to be stretched 300% of their normal length, so us choral peeps can have an easy way to get what we want out of the lush M's, N's, L's, V's, etc.. and to install dipthongs and allow us to choose a default ratio of time between how long the primary vowel is sustained before transitioning to the secondary, as well as an option for transition speed between the two when that moment occurs.

I think it would be relatively easy for the program writers to integrate these concepts, and I think choral directors - especially composers - would jump at it, but I don't know that EW has heard this call from us. I would recommend that anyone interested send a note to the company requesting a version geared for choral directors and composers. It would be highly lucrative for them.